ABSTRACT
The purpose of the present study1 is to see if the results of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) are generalizable to a semantic-aspectual feature of language, in this case the Spanish copular verb estar. Given the complexities in the use of this verb plus its rather late acquisition by L2 learners, it is an ideal candidate to test the extent to which processing instruction (PI) is a useful intervention for helping the acquisition of all structures in a language. As we will see, formmeaning mapping with estar is not nearly as neat and transparent as that of NVN being either SVO or OVS as in the case of the VanPatten and Cadierno study. This copular verb in Spanish has rather subtle properties that are in evidence at the surface level by different classes of lexical items that co-occur with it. We will compare the effects of PI with traditional instruction (TI) to see if the overall superior results of PI in previous research (as well as in this volume) obtain in this study as well.
